Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC)

By staff - Labor Network for Sustainability, June 30, 2023

The government of Canada has just introduced in Parliament the “Canadian Sustainable Jobs Act.” According to the government, the Act will “facilitate and promote the creation of sustainable jobs and support workers and communities in Canada in line as the world advances toward a net-zero future.” It will “put workers and communities at the center of federal policy and decision-making by establishing a framework for accountability, a governance structure and engagement mechanisms to guide effective federal action.”

To hit the ground running, a Sustainable Jobs Interim Action Plan includes:

• Establish the Sustainable Jobs Secretariat
• Create a Sustainable Jobs Partnership Council
• Develop economic strategies through the Regional Energy and Resource Tables
• Introduce a sustainable jobs stream under the Union Training and Innovation Program
• Advance funding for skills development toward sustainable jobs
• Promote Indigenous-led solutions and a National Benefits-Sharing Framework
• Improve labor market data collection, tracking and analysis
• Motivate investors and draw in industry leadership to support workers
• Collaborate and lead on the global stage
• Establish legislation that ensures ongoing engagement and accountability

For text of the bill: www.canada.ca/en/services/jobs/training/initiatives/sustainable-jobs/plan.html

For a government backgrounder on the bill: www.canada.ca/en/natural-resources-canada/news/2023/06/backgrounder-canadian-sustainable-jobs-act.html

For Sustainable Jobs Action Plan: www.canada.ca/en/services/jobs/training/initiatives/sustainable-jobs/plan.html

By Rhiana Gunn-Wright - Hammer & Hope, Summer 2023

I’m an architect of the Green New Deal, and I’m worried the racism in the biggest climate law endangers our ability to get off fossil fuels.

This summer, the earth raged. Fires in Maui and Canada, floods in Delhi and Beijing, heat everywhere — this is the beginning of the climate impacts scientists have long predicted, and the U.S. is unprepared in terms of everything from infrastructure to public health. And if I’m honest, I raged, too. Never in my life have I wished more to be a cyclone, blowing away everything in my path, or an earthquake, shaking everyone to their core until they take seriously the concerns of Black and Indigenous frontline communities.

August marked a year since the Inflation Reduction Act passed, arguably the most significant climate legislation in U.S. history. But the racist compromises and the marginalization of Black people and their demands that facilitated the bill’s passage have seeped into the climate movement, sowing division and narrowing discourse in ways that not only threaten to keep Black people at the bottom of a new green economy but also undermine efforts to address thornier issues, such as who owns energy resources or how to navigate conflicts about resource distribution and land use, questions that money alone cannot answer.

By Kamau Franklin, Mariah Parker, and Maximillian Alvarez - Working People, June 9, 2023

Read the transcript of this interview here.

By Aiko Schaefer and Jeff Johnson - The Just Solutions Podcast, June 9, 2023

By Jeremy Brecher - Labor Network for Sustainability, May 16, 2023

While the Green New Deal started as a proposed national program, some of the most impressive implementations of its principles and policies are occurring at a municipal level. Part 1 of “The Green New Deal in the Cities” provides an extended account of the Boston Green New Deal, perhaps the most comprehensive effort so far to apply Green New Deal principles in a major city. Part 2 presents Green New Deal-style programs developing in Los Angeles and Seattle, and reviews the programs and policies being adapted in cities around the country to use climate protection as a vehicle for creating jobs and challenging injustice.

Urban politics often seem to produce not so much benefit for the people as inequality, exclusion, and private gain for the wealthiest. Does it have to be that way? In cities throughout the US, new political formations, often under the banner of the Green New Deal, are creating a new form of urban politics. They pursue the Green New Deal’s core objectives of fighting climate change in ways that produce good jobs and increase equality. They are based on coalitions of impoverished urban neighborhoods, disempowered racial and ethnic groups, organized labor, and advocates for climate and the environment. They involved widespread democratic mobilization. A case in point is the Boston Green New Deal.

By Jennifer Moon and Zully Juarez - Just Solutions Collective, May 2023

By staff - The Climate and Community Project, et. al., May 2023

It is indisputable that the climate emergency requires the United States to rapidly transform its majority fossil energy system to 100% clean and renewable energy.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s recent sixth synthesis report makes absolutely clear that an unprecedented bold transition to renewable energy with an equally aggressive effort to halt new fossil fuel development and phase out existing fossil fuel usage is absolutely vital to avoiding the most catastrophic consequences of climate change.

This necessary transformation presents a tremendous opportunity to pursue a far more just path forward—one that ends the status quo entrenchment of the fossil fuel industry; empowers federal agencies to use their authorities to accelerate the transitions to a justly sourced, justly implemented, resilient, and equitable power system; actualizes the principles of environmental justice; and preserves our core environmental laws.

This system is composed of our most commonsense and affordable solutions that can be deployed in an efficient and just manner: energy conservation, distributed and resilient renewable energy and storage, and responsibly-sited utility-scale renewables, all paired with robust community engagement and opportunities for real energy democracy.

However, both Congress and the Biden administration are failing to exercise their imaginations to embed justice in a renewable energy future.

After the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, both Democratic and Republican Congress members have proposed numerous “permitting reform” proposals, but the majority continue to argue that achieving a fast transition to renewable energy necessarily means undermining bedrock environmental laws like the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).

This false logic must be interrogated. While these proposals might marginally improve the deployment of utility-scale renewable energy particularly on pristine lands, our energy needs can and must also be met with renewable energy on built surfaces that is more resilient, affordable, and respectful toward communities and wildlands.

Furthermore, any such purported gains of “permitting reform” proposals would be massively dwarfed by the emissions of fossil fuel projects that would also be expedited and result in deepening substantial environmental injustices for countless communities around the nation.

Download a copy of this publication here (PDF).